Why are Batang Kali’s victims still awaiting justice, when their killers long ago admitted their guilt?

More than a decade before US troops were fighting in Vietnam, the Scots Guards had been sent deep into the jungle to root out communist guerrillas who were rising up against British colonial rule. Struggling to acclimatise to the tropical weather, they were forced to patrol dense vegetation, hunting for members of the Malayan National Liberation Army (MNLA), while trying to avoid the deadly booby traps that had been set for them.

Tipped off that Batang Kali was a hotbed of insurgency, and might even be harbouring those who had killed British soldiers, the 16-strong unit from the 7th Platoon of 2 Scots Guards, descended at around 6pm. Far from finding violent bandits, however, the men they came across – many in their fifties and sixties – were veteran tappers, working for Scots plantation owner Thomas Menzies in exchange for food, shelter and a small salary.

Like so many acts of war, the exact sequence of the events which followed is disputed; but what is clear is that by the following morning, 24 unarmed men had been shot dead, the three kongsis (wooden huts which housed the workers and their families) torched, and the survivors scarred forever by the sound of gunfire and the loss of the loved ones whose bodies were left to rot in the sun.

The official version of events – trotted out by successive British governments – is that the victims were indeed communist sympathisers justifiably shot as they tried to flee. But over the years, in-depth investigations have exposed a very different story – that of a pre-planned massacre of innocents.

According to eyewitnesses – including several of the Scots Guards, who risked their own reputations to tell their story – the men and women were shepherded into separate huts for interrogation, which included mock executions. The first villager to be killed, who came under suspicion for possessing a permit for picking fruit, was shot in the back within the hour. The rest were locked up overnight. After the women and children had been loaded on to a truck and driven to the gates in the early morning, the men were led off in small groups to be shot. Only one, Chong Fong, who had fainted, survived. Those who were wounded were “finished off” as they lay on the ground. Days later, relatives went back to the village to recover the corpses. At least one of them had been decapitated.

So brutal are the eyewitness accounts of mass killing, Batang Kali has been described as Britain’s My Lai – a reference to the infamous massacre by US troops that turned the tide of public opinion against the Vietnam War.

But almost as shocking as the incident itself is the scale of the cover-up, which is only coming to light now, 60 years later. Unlike, My Lai, which eventually resulted in criminal charges, no-one has ever been held accountable for what happened at Batang Kali. There has been no court martial, no apology.

Instead, there has been a succession of attempts to whitewash the actions of the Scots Guards and to close down important lines of inquiry. Crucial documents have gone missing, and the only British police investigation – begun on the orders of Labour’s Defence Secretary Denis Healey in 1970 – was halted later that year by the incoming Tory government.

Last week, relatives of those who died were in the High Court in London challenging the government’s latest refusal to hold a public inquiry into the events on the grounds that there are no lessons to be learned.

The relatives are not asking for the surviving Scots Guards, now in their eighties and nineties, to be prosecuted. But buoyed by the growing willingness of governments across the world to apologise for atrocities such as Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, they hope the truth will finally emerge.

“My clients lost an entire generation of males, which left them utterly destitute. They had no support and some of them their brothers and sisters had to be put into orphanages. The experience is very raw for them,” says John Halford, of legal firm Bindmans, who is representing the families. “But governments are capable long after the events of this seriousness to investigate them, reach conclusions, apologise, do the right thing – and that’s exactly what should happen here.”

The massacre of Batang Kali took place in the early stages of a 12-year-long uprising of ethnically Chinese communist sympathisers, many of whom had been armed by Commonwealth Forces and served as resistance fighters against Japanese occupying forces during the Second World War.

Known as the Malayan Emergency (in deference to the owners of the country’s tin mines and rubber plantations who would not have been insured against their losses if it had been termed a war) the conflict later became known as the first in which a “hearts and minds” strategy was adopted.

The Batang Kali massacre took place just a few months after the Scots Guards arrived in the country, at a time when violence was escalating and tensions were running high. In addition, the patrol included several young men on their National Service and the most senior officers were a couple of lance sergeants (corporals acting in the role of sergeants).

In a statement, passed to the High Court last week, Tham Yong, whose fiancé was amongst the victims, described the terror that had gripped the village on their arrival. “I was crying and one of the detectives [who had accompanied the soldiers] said: ‘Don’t cry, I’m not arresting you.’ I said: ‘If you are not arresting us why are you dragging us out? You ask me if I have seen any communists – I don’t even know what they look like. Even if you kill me, I cannot tell you anything because I haven’t seen them.” Yong was 17 at the time of the massacre.

The teenager, who went on to marry Chong Fong, was among those who witnessed the first shooting. According to Halford, however, no survivors were interviewed as part of the official inquiry by Attorney General of the Malayan Federation Sir Stafford Foster-Sutton in 1948-9, because, the official reason claimed, “they were most unlikely to talk, and if they did talk, to tell the truth.” Nor did Sutton pay much heed to the sworn statement from plantation-owner Menzies, who insisted the villagers were good workers who had been with him for up to 18 years.

Instead, Sutton relied on identikit statements from the members of the Scots Guards, which insisted the men had been shot while trying to flee. Six weeks after the massacre and six days after the High Commissioner introduced a new – and retrospectively applied law – giving soldiers a “licence” to kill those trying to flee, the soldiers were exonerated of blame.

The case didn’t really surface again until events in My Lai reawakened interest in military wrongdoing. In 1970, The People newspaper was contacted by several of the Scots Guards who wanted to tell their own version of the Batang Kali story.

Their tales were all remarkably similar. Far from being a reaction to an escape attempt, the soldiers had been briefed to carry out the massacre before they went out on patrol. So calculated were the killings that on the second day anyone too squeamish to continue was told they could “fall out” by one of the sergeants. No-one did, although two soldiers opted for the job of guarding the lorry packed with the women and children.

Testimony from William Cootes and Alan Tuppen was particularly shocking. It suggested they had started firing indiscriminately at their own group of seven villagers when they heard others shooting around them.

In the wake of the new evidence, Healey ordered Scotland Yard to investigate. Det Chief Supt Frank Williams had already interviewed most members of the patrol, other than the sergeants and was making plans to travel to Malaya when Edward Heath became prime minister and put a stop to it. “In 1970, most of the members of this patrol, in the presence of solicitors without any coercion, without any incentive, with very serious consequences for them personally, confessed to mass murder – yet nothing was ever done about it,” Halford says.

It was another 22 years before the massacre of Batang Kali hit the headlines again, this time courtesy of the BBC documentary In Cold Blood, which contained interviews from Chong Fong and other survivors. While the programme failed to persuade the British authorities to reopen their files, the Royal Malaysian Police now launched its own investigation. “Once again the case is put in the hands of a senior police officer who is conscientious and committed,” says Halford. “He gets a list of all those who were killed, tracks down relatives, interviews pretty much everyone who was around including one of the Malayan guides who took the patrol into the jungle.

“He then plans to come to the UK to interview the soldiers and asks the UK government, through Interpol, to trace them. The matter reaches the hands of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, they have an internal discussion and they say, ‘It’s not in our interests for this investigation to proceed, therefore we should not provide this Malaysian detective with the products of the British police investigation.’ ”

Halford says that not only was material withheld and the detective told the soldiers could not be located, but senior officers from the Malaysian Police were asked by the High Commission to steer the detective away the idea of visiting the UK. “That’s interference with a criminal investigation, that’s very serious indeed. It’s a cover-up,” says Halford.

As a consequence, last week’s hearing was the first time all the existing pieces of the jigsaw – including some documents recovered from a hitherto secret Foreign Office archive – had been put together in an official forum.

The relatives are calling for a public inquiry which might pave the way for compensation claims. Although recent developments, such as the decision earlier this year to allow four Kenyans allegedly tortured during the Mau Mau insurgency to sue the government, suggest Britain may be more willing to take responsibility for its colonial past, the MoD and the Foreign Office still contend a Batang Kali inquiry would be unlikely to come up with any recommendations which would prevent a recurrence.

“Regrettably these things continue to happen – it’s not that the British Army has learned the lessons that can be learned from Batang Kali,” says Halford. “Civilians are still detained when they shouldn’t be in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and when they are in detention they sometimes end up dead. There are contemporary examples, so there are clearly lessons to be learned.

“But the other lesson, perhaps the most important one, is that despite the passage of time the truth will out. When something of this seriousness occurs, everyone should know that sooner or later there will be accountability. Perhaps not prosecutions, but sooner or later people will know the truth.”